The critical mass of modern educational provision in Hong Kong has long been provided by the private sector. The public education system was created by the charities and religious bodies during the colonial period, though the government was later involved in the management of the system (see Choi & Kan, forthcoming, for the development of educational governance in Hong Kong). Thus, the presence of the private sector in ‘public’ schooling has long been the norm. When the educational privatisation trend, which started in the US and UK in the 1980s, reached Hong Kong, the government opened doors for further privatisation of public schooling, in the form of educational outsourcing. Educational outsourcing soon became prevalent: a document-based study on outsourcing in English teaching in a third of publicly funded secondary schools (Choi, 2018) showed that three-quarters of schools outsourced, with three contracts per year on average. However, the practice did not draw much attention from the public or scholars, in this ‘already outsourced’ education system (Bates, Choi, & Kim, 2019, p. 10). The lack of attention partly came from the fact that the introduction of educational outsourcing was subtle. It was conducted as part of a wider initiative of the privatisation of public services and occurred through system change rather than through legislation or policy. For instance, the Education Bureau (EDB), a counterpart of the Ministry of Education of some countries, instituted the School-based Management (SBM). The SBM allowed for schools to deploy their funds with maximum autonomy. EDB additionally created funds to support schools through outsourcing. Because English is recognised as a crucial social capital for securing higher education and prestigious jobs, schools mobilised the extra funds to purchase English teaching, making it the most popular area for outsourcing (Choi, Walker, Tang, Ko, & Chiu, 2018). Drawing on data collected through three interrelated research projects

Teacher feedback can be useful in helping English as Foreign Language (EFL) students revise their draft writing. Investigating how EFL students respond to various types of teacher feedback in draft revision has been regarded as an important field of study. However, such investigation is time-consuming and labour-intensive, which limits its practical application in EFL writing classes. To address this issue, this study was designed to explore an initiative to use a systematic method in tracking and analysing student revisions in response to teacher feedback. Firstly, an automated tracking method was proposed and applied to examine the technical feasibility of analysing the effects of teacher feedback on student revisions for 75 EFL undergraduate students from two Hong Kong universities. Secondly, the study explicitly sought to explore teachers’ perspectives on the automated tracking method by interviews. The quantitative results suggest that the automated tracking method can analyse teacher feedback and student revision with high accuracy compared to the manual analysis, while the qualitative results shed light on the benefits and limitations of the method. Overall, our findings provide a basis for further research on harnessing the potential of technology to support teachers in developing their professional feedback practice for EFL writing. Copyright © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

English-medium lectures can be the source of much frustration for students at universities where most learners and lecturers use English as an additional language. Developing listening strategy awareness can help students traverse the difficulties they encounter in lectures. This study reports on the most challenging listening strategies for first-year undergraduates at an English-medium university in Hong Kong. Student reflections, an Academic Listening Strategy Inventory, and interviews were used as data gathering tools. Within a framework of perceptive, cognitive, metacognitive and socio-affective strategies, the most challenging items were technical vocabulary, inferencing and focus. In addition, some less commonly reported challenges were identified which highlight the complexities of academic listening in non-Anglophone English-medium contexts. Copyright © 2020 Asian ESP Journal. All rights reserved.

Undergraduates are often advised to expand their discipline-specific vocabulary in order to cope with the rigor of reading and writing academic texts. For the students studying in English-medium settings, it is in their interest to acquire vocabulary in their disciplines as this is vital to academic success. While students recognize the importance of discipline-specific vocabulary acquisition, they are typically unable to do so due to their heavy work on learning and assessment tasks. With the advent of mobile technology, one way to address this problem is to create vocabulary apps. To meet this need, this paper presents a gamified, discipline-specific vocabulary learning app Books vs Brains@PolyU. It was developed to help busy undergraduates to build a repertoire of the vocabulary across seven disciplines. We explored students' perceptions and evaluation of this tool via interviews with sixteen student participants of the project. The results show that students found the tool useful and motivating, indicating the effectiveness of the app in helping busy undergraduates to build and expand their knowledge of discipline-specific vocabulary. Copyright © 2021 Hong Kong Bao Long Accounting And Secretarial Limited. All rights reserved.

While technology use is becoming increasingly common in education, teachers remain reluctant to use it and hesitant on how best to incorporate it into their teaching and practice.  There is a strong demand from institutions for English language teachers to cope with the changing landscape of teaching in the 21st century.  This explorative study investigated Hong Kong tertiary teachers’ beliefs on continuing professional development activities to enhance their teaching.  The study had a two-phase research design, with an initial questionnaire (N = 58) followed by semistructured interviews (N = 12) to unpack the participants’ hidden voices.  The findings illustrated that most teachers are enthusiastic about professional development activities, though there is a misalignment between what universities value and reward and what teachers see as most beneficial for enhancing their teaching practices.  The results suggested that professional development activities should focus on sharing good teaching practice (e.g., informal chats, mentoring) within universities rather than on rewarding attending conferences and on-off, nonintegrated workshops. Copyright © 2021 Lucas Kohnke.

This study investigated the English writing anxiety experienced by preservice English as second/foreign language teachers in Hong Kong, and its impact on their written corrective feedback (WCF). A total of 34 highly proficient preservice teachers responded to the Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (Cheng, 2004), which measured writing anxiety in three dimensions (i.e., cognitive, somatic and avoidance anxiety). Ten were selected to provide WCF to a sample student writing and receive an individual interview immediately afterwards. Over half of the 34 participants were found suffering from moderate or high levels of writing anxiety, especially in the cognitive dimension. Compared to their less apprehensive peers who adopted more indirect feedback, highly anxious student teachers had a clear preference to direct and comprehensive feedback. Their WCF practices were found affected by five factors, including their conception of English writing, concerns of teacher professional credibility and work ethics, concerns of student cognition and motivation, confidence in students’ ability, and their feedback experience as students and student teacher during teaching practicum. These factors were synthesized into a grounded-theory model of four internal forces that drive student teachers towards either a focus-on-form, direct, comprehensive approach to WCF or a broad-based, indirect and selective approach. Suggestions were made for further research. Copyright © 2020 Qin Xie and Junting Yuan.

Due to it being generally regarded as an effective pedagogic approach, the flipped classroom has been widely applied in various disciplines in higher education in many places around the world, but has rarely been used in primary English education. This research investigated teacher and student perceptions of the impact, feasibility, and potential of the flipped EFL classroom by conducting a one-year project among 277 students and eight teachers in a primary school in Hong Kong. Teacher and student reflection, roundtable discussion minutes, and trainer observation and logs were employed as means of continual data collection. The results showed that the flipped classroom improved the teacher–student relationship and teaching and learning performance, and increased teacher and student motivation and confidence. This study demonstrates the high feasibility of using the flipped classroom for primary English education and its great potential for providing students with personalized learning, developing their self-regulated learning and active learning skills. Copyright © 2021 The Author(s).

This research conducted diagnostic assessment of problems in first-year undergraduates’ English academic papers and tracked potential sources of the problems to the writing process and strategy use. Data collected include 339 term papers and interviews with 17 students. The samples were manually error tagged and marked against a detailed diagnostic checklist. The resultant textual features were then compared between two subgroups of Chinese students in the sample, namely, those graduating from local schools in Hong Kong (LS) and those coming from the mainland and sojourning in Hong Kong (MS). The analyses found both groups had the poorest performance in source integration and vocabulary use. LS used simpler words and made more grammatical errors, whereas MS attempted sophisticated vocabulary more successfully and used a wider variety of words and sentence structures. The difficulties they experienced, however, were rather similar, residing mainly at the researching, planning and formulating stages. Action control theory was introduced to interpret the self-regulatory strategies they adopted to cope with perceived difficulties during the writing process. Strategies to control goals, control resources, and control cognitive load were found to be the most typical. While these strategies could reduce their difficulties, only some seemed also to help with performance. A conceptual framework is proposed at the end to link writing products, process and self-regulatory control strategies as evidenced in the study. Four diagnoses are drawn with suggestions for practice and further research.本項研究對大學一年級本科生英語學術論文寫作中存在的問題進行了診斷性評估，並通過審視寫作過程和策略使用，追蹤了問題的可能來源。收集的資料包括339篇學期論文和十七次學生訪談。研究人員對所有文本進行了詳細的錯誤標記，然後系統地比較了來自香港本地學校 (LS) 和來自大陸並在香港求學的中國學生 (MS) 這兩個組別的文本。比較發現，兩組學生都在文獻整合和詞彙使用方面表現最差。 LS的文本中使用了更多的簡單詞彙，語法錯誤也更多，而MS運用了較多的複雜詞彙，單詞和句子結構變化也較為多樣。就寫作過程而言，兩組學生遇到的困難很相似，主要存在於1) 對寫作內容進行研究，收集整理和消化資料，2) 制定寫作計畫，和 3) 撰寫這三個階段。研究應用了行為控制理論來分析寫作中的策略使用，結果發現策略主要用於控制目標，資源和認知負荷。這些策略雖然可以幫助學生減輕困難，但只有少數有助於提高文本品質。基於本研究的發現

Integrated writing is increasingly used in language assessment programmes. As a hybrid task, it requires students to coordinate different language skills, i.e. listening, reading and writing, to retrieve information from multiple sources, and compose an essay for a specific purpose. Tapping into the varied skills that contribute to successful integrated writing is especially beneficial for low proficiency students. However, the mechanisms underlying the impact of these skills on integrated writing performance have yet to be thoroughly studied. This study sampled 103 first-year undergraduate students in Hong Kong who showed relatively low proficiency in Chinese language. They completed three independent tasks measuring their listening, reading, and writing skills; an integrated listening-reading-writing task; and an integrated writing strategy use questionnaire. The results indicated that together, the independent skills accounted for 29.5% of the variance in integrated writing performance, suggesting that integrated writing is a skill that goes far beyond the simple combination of listening, reading, and writing. Independent writing showed the strongest correlation with integrated writing, while both independent listening and independent writing exerted direct and indirect effects on integrated writing performance. However, the effect of reading on integrated writing performance was insignificant, even though the two were significantly correlated. These results offer insights into the complex relationships between the skills. The findings enrich our understanding of the construct of integrated writing, as well as suggest strategies for teaching less proficient learners. Copyright © 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

This multiple-case study investigated the experience of three preservice teachers who attempted formative assessment (FA) strategies in their English as a second language writing class during their teaching practicum in a secondary school in Hong Kong. Based on data from 17 lesson observations and 24 interviews, the study examined the three teachers’ implementation of FA strategies during cycles of pre-, while- and post-writing stages. Also analyzed are the teachers’ reflections on and their mentors’ and students’ evaluation of their FA implementation. The study found the teachers could translate their understanding of FA principles into teaching and assessment strategies appropriately, but the school’s accountability culture worked against their innovation. School mentors’ open-mindedness and support to their FA attempts were found to be crucial. The findings are discussed centering on key issues in the relational, developmental and contextual dimensions of the teaching practicum and their impact on preservice teachers’ practice and attitude. Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.